With the exception of the issue of abortion, there has been almost no violence in this country among religious lines, and the seperation of church and state is a major reason for this.

Best statement made in this thread so far.

The current events on this planet underscore the unchanging truth of a rather icky part of our nature: Organized religion is responsible for an illogical amount of the blood shed throughout human history. Our country's efforts to keep government separate from religion should be an applauded example, not reviled.

Now on the particular issue of the PoA, I couldn't care less whether "Under God" was in there and I think we should be focusing our resources on more important problems. My first reaction to this was, "haven't we already covered this before?"

I think a more important issue is... why do we even need to make our children recite a daily pledge of fealty in the first place? It's always sounded rather fascist to me, with or without the God reference.